1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to synthesizing speech from textual content. More specifically, the invention relates to a method and system for a speech synthesis and advertising service.
2. Description of the Related Art
Text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is the process of generating natural-sounding audible speech from text, and several TTS synthesis systems are commercially available. Some TTS applications are designed for desktop, consumer use. Others are designed for telephony applications, which are typically unable to process content submitted by consumers. The desktop TTS applications suffer from typical disadvantages of desktop-installed software. For example, the applications need to be installed and updated. Also, the applications consume desktop computing resources, such as disk space, random access memory, and CPU cycles. As a result, these host computers might need more resources than they would otherwise, and smaller devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDA's), currently are usually incapable of running TTS applications that produce high-quality audible speech.
TTS application developers often write the software to run on a variety of host computers, which support different hardware, drivers, and features. Targeting multiple platforms increases development costs. Also development organizations typically need to provide installation support to users who install and update their applications.